Aktuality

Troubling the transnational feminist framework: Intersections of feminisms, postsocialism and neoliberalism in the Estonian context

Thursday 3.10.2019, 12:30, room FHS 1

(Department of Gender Studies, José Martího 31, Prague 6)

This talk maps out the intersections of feminisms and neoliberalism in the postsocialist Estonian context while also raising a larger question of how to talk about issues at the level of the nation-state in the wider context of transnational feminist theory. Estonia’s prevalent focus on the nation-state and Western Europe in the postsocialist transition period has until recently discouraged Estonian feminists from relying on transnational feminist theory, whose critiques of coloniality and neoliberalism would be especially productive for Estonian society.

The genealogy of Estonian feminism in its journey across the neoliberal terrain is full of multi-layered dialogues with and translations of a variety of Western feminist paradigms, including postcolonial critique to some extent. Drawing on interviews with women who identify as feminists in Estonia, this talk explores how the stories we tell about feminism and its past influence the kind of theoretical and political work we are able to do. Zooming in on the story of the emergence of feminisms in postsocialist Estonia, I call upon feminists in Estonia to reflect critically on how they conceptualize feminisms, while at the same time building a framework to think about local feminism within transnational feminist context.

Drawing on the work of scholars (e.g. Marciniak 2006, Suchland 2011) who have studied the marginalization of the perspectives from post-state-socialist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in the realm of transnational feminist knowledge-formation, I argue that perspective from CEE thus presents us with the potential to trouble existing transnational epistemologies. Echoing Leela Fernandes (2013), I explore the question what it might mean to locate feminist praxis in Estonia within a transnational feminist frame in the specific historical time and location, for both the local context and for feminist conceptions of the transnational. I suggest that the analysis of the intersections of feminisms and neoliberalism in the Estonian context would benefit from transnational feminist analytical frameworks, while the Estonian experience would in turn add complexity and depth to the critical engagement with neoliberalism within transnational feminist theory and praxis. On a more general level, I highlight that the local needs to be maintained as an analytical tool, necessarily in a de-essentialized form within transnational feminist theorization and praxis.

References:

Fernandes, Leela. 2013. Transnational Feminism in the United States. Knowledge, Ethics, Power (New York and London: New York University Press.

Marciniak, Katarzyna. 2006. “Immigrant Rage: Alienhood, ‘Hygienic’ Identities, and the Second World,” differences 17(2): 33-63.

Suchland, Jennifer. 2011. “Is Postsocialism Transnational?” Signs 36(4): 837-862.

Redi Koobak is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research (SKOK), University of Bergen, Norway. She has worked as Assistant Professor at the Department of Thematic Studies – Gender Studies, Linköping University, Sweden and as Visiting Lecturer in Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA. Her research interests include feminist visual culture studies; intersections of postcolonialism and postsocialism; cultural representations of gender, war and nationalism; transnational and local feminisms; feminist science studies and nuclear cultures; and creative writing methodologies. Koobak is the author of the monograph Whirling Stories: Postsocialist Feminist Imaginaries and the Visual Arts (Linköping: Linköping University Press, 2013). Her work has been published in Gender, Place and Culture, Feminist Theory, Feminist Review, European Journal of Women’s Studies and Frontiers. She is the editor, with Madina Tlostanova and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert, of the volume Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues: Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice (forthcoming in 2020 in the series Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality). She is currently working on a research project on the impact of the #metoo movement on academia and her second monograph on art as minor activism.